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Thoughts on the first half of the entries! I CHOOSE YOU, CTHULHU! I said this when it first came out, but ICYC doesn’t strike me as an RPG as much as a party game. You don’t really play “characters” as much as come up with a list and try to convince everyone else to pick your thing as the Best Thing three times. Also the font honestly hurts my eyes. That being said, I bet if you turned this into a CAH-style card game it’d work pretty well. FLICK It's an interesting idea to tie the resolution mechanic to a physical skill test, to wit flicking a penny along track foosball style. It’s a nice, simple idea and I could see it being fun, but I can also see it leading to player frustration when they just want to perform a task and keep flinging the penny off the sheet. The only problem is that it's very hard to flick a coin on a piece of paper and not have it either barely move or go flying off the sheet, as my brief experiments showed. Still, it’s cool to see how simple a generic system can be. WHO ARE YOU At the base, this is about as generic as an RPG can get; assign 20 points to items on a List Of Stuff You Can Do. The resolution mechanic, though, it pretty drat funny. The GM figures difficulty, you place a garbage can that many feet away, and the player tries to toss a paper ball into it. Simple! But again, while I’m sure it’s fun, you really need a group who’s going to buy into the overall concept to make it work. MACHEWARRIOR It’s always good to see a nice, simple mech system that doesn’t get caught up in stupid-long gear lists. Unfortunately, that genericness kind of hurts the final product here; while the player gets to define what their mech parts are specifically (i.e., saying that their Utility part is a High Soliton Radar or whatever) there’s nothing that makes that choice matter. I feel the only thing missing here is some mechanic that allows the device choices matter. Otherwise there’s no real difference saying that your weapon is a sniper rifle versus a rocket launcher. A simple result-tweaking mechanic would work well here; maybe if your part is appropriate to the task the Cooldown is reduced or you get a free reroll or something. SAVE THE DATE This one kind of reminds me of games like Shoot the Moon or Boy x Boy. It’s an interesting premise you don’t see in games often (simple normal human interaction), and the presentation and mechanics make this “Romantic Comedy: The RPG”. The mechanics are really simple, but that’s fine because the premise is really simple too. Why overcomplicate? I also like how it’s a “multi-GM” game where everyone gets to narrate and be the target of the actions of others. WE ARE ALL STARSTUFF Let’s start with the most interesting thing in this game: Once the characters are created, anyone can play any character. It’s a neat idea that fits well with the idea of playing the whole crew of a starship, and if the group isn’t into that idea not including it doesn’t break anything. There’s a clear Fate inspiration here in the Aspects, and I like how the die pool building works. It encourages players to think in a larger scale about the things that can help them, and the GM to do the same. It's always nice to see mechanics that reinforce having a strong concept and back that up. It’s a surprisingly complete game for what amounts to a five-page pocketmod. SOME ONE-PAGE HEARTBREAKER You know, this feels like a different take on a *World game, with the delineated “moves” that depend very highly on narrative context. I also like how narrative and dramatic scenes are treated differently mechanically, but not in a way that feels jarring. The dramatic resolution setup where you have to get 20 “goal points” to win is cool, and I like how anyone can contribute at trying to get that goal completed. In fact, you could probably expand this out to a full PbtA style game. Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 19:40
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| # ? Apr 17, 2024 00:49 |
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https://www.dropbox.com/s/9etycrdr7jazonm/FLICK.pdf Here's a new link to FLICK, sorry the old one broke.
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Jul 21, 2014 19:55
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Hey, if anyone should be apologizing for this contest, it's me. I went back and tweaked my comments.
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Jul 21, 2014 20:00
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Thanks for effort, even if its belated. Reviewing all these seems like a big workload.quote:SOME ONE-PAGE HEARTBREAKER
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Jul 21, 2014 21:06
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Ah, I missed that. I was bouncing back and forth through the document too much, I guess. I'll redo my notes when I get home.
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Jul 21, 2014 21:56
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Hey, I know I said I'd do this a while ago, but I put up a thread for BashfulBanana's Final Form here. Can't wait to see where this goes.
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Jul 23, 2014 02:24
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Review Batch 2! PLAY GODS At its core, this feels like a very light version of Microscope or Kingdom. The players are gods who are competing to create a world. It's very simple, can probably be run in an hour or two, and would make a good lead-in to a different game. To a certain degree, it also reminds me of Epidah Ravidol's "Vast & Starlit", which is a diceless narrative-driven game. I can see this being something fun to run as a PbP game, too. YOU AND YOUR DUMB FRIENDS You know a game is something special when it starts off with "You and Your Dumb Friends is a game for 3 or more grown-ups, wherein each player takes on the role of one of the other people in the group. That’s right - you all roleplay as each other." Because there's absoluetly no way for that to go bad. Really, I can't imagine this being played and not devolving into an argument at some level. MIKEY'S FRIDAY NIGHT A.D.D. DRAGONLANCE ADVENTURE This feels like it was almost a good idea, but in all honesty it's a very minimal effort thing. It's not the fact that everyone just picks a Dragonlance character and go do something, but the system boils down to "to do something, figure out the percent chance and roll under", and isn't tied to the characters' definitions at all. I could at least see if there was something saying "if you have a trait you can <dice trick>", but unfortunately there's not much here. WIZARD COMMUNITY COLLEGE At first blush this reminds me of the old "Eldrich rear end Kicking" RPG, which was also about wizards blasting the poo poo out of each other. I like how you can be a wizard of anything, and you can really only do things that relate to your spellcasting style. The only real problem I have with the game is that there's no real levels of status ailments before you're out of the game. You could get to the point where everything in three realities is destroyed and you still keep playing. Which is fine if that's what you're going for, but it seems like it makes it hard to make one bad thing feel worse than another since they're all technically equivalent. HELL VICE MERCILESS This game is "Hotline Miami: the RPG" and it does that ridiculously well. At its heart it's basically a PbtA game, but using 1d6 and with a different structure. By breaking everyone's actions into "what you can say you do in five seconds", it encourages people to not think and instead act off their first instinct, but at the same time the more stuff you try to do an your move the greater the chance you gently caress up, so there's an interesting balance between being the cautious guy and the insane risk-taker. The whole thing clearly moves at a fast pace because that's built into the game mechanics.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:57
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Final batch! COMBAT POETS Another game that I think would work really well as a PbP game, Combat Poets is about killing each other with words. It's a very simple premise, and I like how the whole thing is based around writing poems to make yourself sound less bad than everyone else. But what's really neat is how you can use specific types of poem structures for special effects. Iambic Pentameter lets you heal, Limericks do a ton of damage, and Haikus let you turtle up when you're on your last legs. The only downside I see to the system is that there's no reason to not use one of those forms because any other form of poetry doesn't give you anything extra. DROWNS THE SKY This one's straight up misery tourism, but in a good way. You play as colonists on a dying world who know there's no hope of rescue before The End comes. What do you do? How are you going to try and be remembered? What will you try to accomplish before you die? However you do it, each player has the choice of trying to either protect themselves, someone else, be remembered, or some mix thereof. What impressed me is how evocative it manages to be in such a small space; trying to make a monument works and feels very different from preparing for the end, and I like that just experiencing the world (either peacfully or by engaging in vices) doesn't help you in the end because it makes it feel like a form of quiet acceptance or denial. This is one game I'd really like to try myself and see what kind of narrative comes out of it. LOST SKIES Lost Skies has a really interesting premise: you're dead and stuck in a hellish purgatory between Earth and the afterlife, and are slowly turning into a demon. Your character is composed of a Human Soul that represents your better traits, and a Demonic Beast that all your worst traits. Eventually you will transform, so you're trying to delay this as long as possible. And while I like the mechanics and the setup, the biggest problem I have is that I feel like I'm only seeing half the system here. Like, I don't get what the characters do, if there's an outside force they're working against or if they just loiter around the afterlife. There's also the problem that I don't know how conflicts are supposed to work; are NPCs stated up like PCs, or are bad guys handled more simply? All that being said, I'd love to see this game more fleshed out because it's a really good foundation, it just needs more built on it. FINAL FORM This game may be one of the anime-iest things I've ever read. The whole game is pretty laser-focused on animes beating the poo poo out of each other in the most over-the-top ways possible. I think the greatest idea is that everyone makes up a bunch of insane fighting abilities, but instead of making them for their own characters, all the powers are dumped in a pile and drawn randomly to see what power your character apparently has. It's a great way to simulate the pull-a-new-power-out-of-my-rear end factor of most fighting anime, and while I normally wouldn't like it the "roll to see how you act before the actual punching starts" table is great and just further cements the insane nature of the genre. Letting everyone who isn't involved in a particular fight vote for who was more badass is pretty cool too, and would encourage people coming up with entertaining descriptions. TWICE AS BRIGHT Twice as Bright has a similar theme as Drowns the Sky, to wit characters facing their inevitable deaths. TAB is more "traditional", in that it's more about going down swinging. Every resource your character has is limited, up to and including your skills. You get 15 skill slots to fill in, and you "spend" these skills to pass tasks you can't shoot your way past. You can even spend irrelevent skills, it just uses up more of them. I'm not sure what (if anything) is supposed to happen when you run out of skills, though. I suppose that ties into the "Death Move", where you can sacrifice your character to automatically overcome any obstacle. Again, I like how thematic all the rules are, and I also like how it models the dwindling resource idea by having you write your resources down on parts of the sheet and tear them off as you use them. Man, now I just need to determine who the winners are...not an easy task given the quality of entries.
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Jul 25, 2014 16:46
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Evil Mastermind posted:COMBAT POETS Thanks for the comments! I definitely envisioned the three listed forms as the bread and butter of most games, but other kinds of poems could still be chosen as the winner by the referee; it's sort of this game's version of the rule of cool, where you could do something unexpected. "This is so crazy, it HAS to work." Looking forward to seeing the winner announced, and I'm really impressed with the work people have put into this.
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Jul 25, 2014 23:09
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Well, it's three months late, but it's finally time to announce the winners! It really wasn't easy; there were some amazing games people put together, and everyone should be pretty proud of themselves here. There are some seriously amazing concepts in this thread, and some really innovative mechanics. Ultimately I looked at two factors: the usual "I really want to play this" factor, and how well the authors worked with the concept of only using one sheet of paper. At the start of the contest I said I was going to have two main prizes, but due to the delays on my part and a surprising amount of foresight on my part, I actually have enough for four winners! So, without further ado, the four winners of the One-Page RPG Design contest are: LordVonEarlDuke for HELL VICE MERCILESS, which is both thematically excellent in both mechanics and visual presentation. (also "You are young children..." is amazing but so sad) Auralsaurus Flex for Twice As Bright, for best use of the one-sheet concept by modeling dwindling personal resources (and life) by destroying parts of your character sheet. Palolmania for Some One-Page Heartbreaker, which crams a lot of PbtA mechanics into one sheet and has a very interesting conflict resolution system. UnCO3 for Drowns The Sky, which has what I feel is an amazing amout on emotional depth in such a small design space. Congratulations, folks! Each winner will receive a copy of Epidiah Ravachol's microRPG Vast & Starlit, as well as all three supplements. Each microgame weighs in at about 650 words and is about the size of a business card.  In addition, each winner will recieve a $20 gift certificate to DriveThruRPG! So, if LordEarlVonDuke, Auralsaurus Flex, Palolmania, UnCO3 could please PM me your contact info, I can get the prizes out early next week. Again, thanks to everyone who entered, and congratulations to the winners!
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Jul 26, 2014 19:30
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PM sent! Thank you for electing SOPH as a winner, I didn't expect a generic system to stand against such thematic and evocative competition! For anyone that is interested in the scene driven mechanics, development continues on the full system (Some Heartbreaker) and I post my notes to this thread.
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Jul 26, 2014 19:55
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The other submissions for this contest were very strong entries, so I'm incredibly honored that Twice as Bright was selected as a winner. Congratulations to UnCO3, Paolomania, and LordVonEarlDuke as well!
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Jul 26, 2014 23:19
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Woooo! Congrats guys and/or gals. You all really deserve it. Honestly I'd love to see more than one of the ideas in this thread turned into full fledged products. And thanks for running an awesome contest, even with the delays, haha.
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Jul 27, 2014 01:07
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I'd like to congratulate LordVonEarlDuke, Auralsaurus Flex, Palolmania, and UnCO3 for their victory. Your entries were great and you deserve the win. It was a fun contest and I enjoyed participating.
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Jul 27, 2014 01:10
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Congrats all winners! Looking forward to playing these some day, if the opportunity presents itself.
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Jul 27, 2014 04:22
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Congratulations! It was fun participating, and seeing all the submissions present.
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Jul 27, 2014 15:40
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OH cool i won i didn't even see this um but i don't have PMs
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Aug 15, 2014 20:53
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shoot me an email at sean dot m dot dunstan at gmail. I need your mailing address and your DriveThruRPG account email.
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Aug 16, 2014 00:34
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| # ? Apr 17, 2024 00:49 |
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Evil Mastermind posted:DROWNS THE SKY
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Aug 19, 2014 01:51
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